Pepper Smash - A Cocktail Kitchen has lost its talented chef-co-owner, Vijay Sadhu. “I want to take a break and spend time with my kids,” he told me in an email, adding that he sold his shares last month to his co-owner, Al Bhakta (owner of Genghis Grill). The restaurant opened in the Shops at Legacy in the summer of 2012, in the space that was formerly Sadhu’s modern Indian restaurant, Sutra.

Sadhu says that if he does open another restaurant, “it will be in Dallas, and it’s going to be an Indian place, for sure.” Here’s hoping he does.

The Tried and True, everyone’s favorite bourbon-and-country-ham tavern, closed on Sunday, as Side Dish reported yesterday. The Henderson Ave. spot was a Best in DFW: New Restaurant of 2012, and it earned a place among the Best in DFW: Gastropubs earlier this year. I caught up with owner Nick Badovinus on the phone, who told me that he decided not to renew the lease, which expires next month. His original lease on the space, which previously housed Neighborhood Services Tavern, expired in January of 2012, he said, and when that date loomed, “at that point we decided to do T and T,” so he signed a one-year extension.

More recently, given the chance to sign another extension, he stepped back. “We’ve been giving the business a really hard look,” he says, “and deciding to go ahead and commit ourselves for a five year period was just not in our best strategic interests for everything we’re doing.” That includes opening next year a new Neighborhood Services in Addison, which he says will be “a hybrid” of the original restaurant on Lovers Lane and Neighborhood Services Bar and Grill on Preston Road. The Addison location, he says, will be open daily, serving lunch and dinner, and will also offer brunch — featuring “a lot of stuff we developed for T and T for brunch.”

Badovinus has also been consulting for Omni Hotels and Resorts on some projects nationally. At some point, he’ll be looking at making some changes at Texas Spice here at the Omni Dallas, but that hasn’t happened yet. “We’ll probably start working on some of that stuff next year,” he says, but he doesn’t know whether it will be earlier in the year or later.

Finally, he has a new project in the works that he hasn’t been able to say much about yet. “We’re pretty close on a lease for something different that’s not N.S. [Neighborhood Services] or O.S.K. [Off-Site Kitchen], and I’m hoping we can go kind of hard and talk about it at the end of the year. It’s never a deal till it’s a deal.”

Casa Rubia, a modern tapas restaurant from Jonn Baudoin and chef Omar Flores, the team from Driftwood, is arguably the most highly anticipated opening in the Trinity Groves complex, and the menu looks very exciting indeed. There are “simple” tapas such as aceitunas (Arbequina olives confit with orange, herbs and garlic) or boquerones (white anchovies with fennel and pickled shallot). Or the one I’m most jazzed to taste: erizos — sea urchin, rustic bread, quail yolk and wow! Ibérico lardo! There are also Spanish cheeses and hams (a full range of Ibérco cuts, plus jamón serrano). And then “complex” tapas, things like trucha — speckled trout with Serrano ham, salsify, Pedro Ximenez sherry and papas arrugadas. Or conejo — rabbit leg with smoked egg puree, bacon, lentils and natural jus. Or setas — maitake mushrooms with quince, duck egg, Idiazabal cheese and “soft herbs.” Are you a paella lover? Each night there’s a paella del dia, served for four or more. See the entire menu below.

As expected, there’s an all-Spanish wine list (what fun!), and on the back of the menu, Baudoin proposes a selection of 10 terrific sherries — the best drink there is for tapas.

Open Monday-Thursday 5 to 10 p.m., Friday-Saturday 5 to 11 p.m. No reservations.

President Obama will be in Dallas today to encourage uninsured Texans to sign up for health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act. He also has a couple of fund-raisers to attend. If he’s not satisfied with the eats at them (who knows whether they’ll be rubber-chicken events), he might be wondering where he can get a great bite.

Forget about Lucia: Word on the street is that no tables are set aside for VIPs there — even Jennifer Uygur’s mom can’t get a table unless she calls a month ahead on the first day of the month like everyone else. So forget about that. Unless he wants to take his chances and try to get a seat at the chef’s counter — there might even be room there for three Secret Service guys to sit next to him.

The president might be interested in seeing what all the fuss at FT33 is about — after all, chef-owner Matt McCallister was just named The Dallas Morning News’ first-ever Chef of the Year. So that’s an idea. He could go to Hibiscusor Al Biernat’s, and feast on some fabulous locally-raised grass fed beef.

Or he might want to play it lower-key, and spend a more quiet evening eating something soothing and delicious. In that case, I’d head to Mesa Veracruz Coastal Cuisine. I understand it’s only busy on weekends, so that should be no problem — and it’s probably an ideal situation in terms of the Secret Service securing the space. Bonus: the president reportedly loves mom and pop places, and Mesa fits that bill (as do FT33 and Lucia). Mr. President, if you go to Mesa, please do not miss the enmoladas — Olga Reyes‘ wonderful hand-made corn tortillas layered with her fabulous mole sauce and folded into neat packets — and then have the cochinita pibíl. And be sure to have a Meso-Rita — which may well be the best margarita in town.

Maybe you have a great idea of where the president should dine post-rubber-chicken fest. Please let him know in a comment!

One of the wonderful things about the Dallas dining scene is how dynamic it is and has been — especially in the last few years. It has been quite an amazing — and rapid — evolution. At the moment, the city is in the throes of major seismic changes. By this time next year the scene is likely to look very different indeed.

Consilient Hospitality

Consilient's Hospitality's Tristan Simon

That’s largely thanks to Consilient Hospitality. Besides having opened high-profile CBD Provisions earlier this month, the restaurant and hotel management group, led by dining visionary Tristan Simon (who partnered last year with the Headington Companies), has been snapping up the city’s most talented and accomplished chefs at a rate that makes a food lover’s head spin. Over the past year, Consilient has hired Jeff Harris (a two-time The Best in DFW Chef who earned four stars at Bolsa and at Craft Dallas); Jeffery Hobbs (who helped earn four stars at Sissy’s Southern Kitchen and Bar); Tim Bevins (Craft Dallas, Rick’s Chophouse); Graham Dodds (Central 214, Bolsa); Michael Ehlert (The Chesterfield, Campo Modern Country Bistro) and pastry chef Alison Morse (Five Sixty by Wolfgang Puck). That’s an incredible pool of culinary talent.

This morning, Consilient announced that Harris would head the kitchen at AF+B, the American tavern it plans to open in Fort Worth in December. Shortly after the announcement, I asked Simon in a phone interview whether he’s planning to take over the world. “I think Jeff will be the last of the big announcements of that kind for a while,” he said. He explained that Harris’ approach to cooking very much epitomizes Consilient’s food philosophy: “Keep it simple, keep it focused, keep the number of moving parts on the dish fairly limited, and just let the quality of the cooking speak for itself.” The goal of AF+B, says Simon, “is to elevate American tavern cooking in a way that we think of as modern.” Harris has also done reasonably high-volume cooking, essential at AF+B, which will have 180 seats. Harris replaces Hobbs, who left the company in August.

Earlier this year Consilient snatched Bevins, who had been working as executive chef at Rick’s Chophouse in McKinney, to head Front Room, the restaurant at the Lumen hotel. Bevins wasn’t making much of an impression at Rick’s (on this critic, anyway), but he definitely did at Craft Dallas, where he headed the kitchen just before it closed. Joining Bevins at Front Room as chef de cuisine is Ehlert, whom Simons as brought over from Hibiscus. Ehlert made his Dallas debut last year at the Chesterfield, where his sophisticated cooking helped the short-lived bar earn three stars; previously he had been executive sous chef at Daniel Boulud’s DBGB in New York. After serving briefly as executive chef at the erstwhile Campo Modern Country Bistro, Ehlert was snagged by Consilient for the Hibiscus kitchen at Hibiscus. Until recently he was part of the team there headed by chef Jason Ferraro. Hibiscus earned four stars in a review July.

Over the past few months, Consilient has been rethinking Front Room, and Simon is now looking at a more involved redesign than he’d originally envisioned. To that end, he plans to close the restaurant for a remodel in December and reopen shortly after the new year with a completely different feel than its current mid-century modern style: “purely modern, sophisticated, with a modern artisan furnishings theme that accords nicely with Tim’s cooking.” December is a slow time, he says; best to make the changes then. In the interim, a temporary dining room will be set up for the hotel, which will continue providing in-room dining and banquets.

What’s being planned for Front Room is somewhat unusual, says Simon. Breakfast, lunch, brunch and in-room dining will be pretty straightforward, in line with what Bevins has been serving lately. But at dinner, “a very different restaurant will emerge — one that is more ambitious, more truly chef-driven, more reservation-based, more destination-based.” And with a completely new menu, naturally. Bevins, who eats vegan “90 percent of the time,” has been “feverishly working to develop that new menu vision,” Simon adds. “He is so vegetable-oriented, and he cooks with such a clean and precise hand, he’s able to tease out flavors — particularly with vegetables — that’s unlike anything we’ve seen before. His commitment to pure, clean flavors is really going to define that menu.”

As for his decision to bring Ehlert on board, Simons saw a good fit in partnering him with Bevins; the two have cooked together on six or seven occasions. “They just lined up,” says Simon, similar to the way Ferraro and Dodds have lined up as co-chefs at Hibiscus.

Until recently, it was fairly unusual to see restaurants run by co-chefs, but for Consilient, such teamwork makes sense. “I think increasingly what we’re seeing is we get the most spectacular results from these kitchens if we can create teams. Tim will direct, but we think he and Michael will create a very special chemistry. They investigate the potential of dishes in the same way.” Ehlert’s experience working with Boulud, says Simon, gave him organizational skills in the kitchen that are very important to Bevins — “and that very precise technique — super-precision cooking.”

Speaking of Hibiscus, Consilient recently hired Dodds away from Central 214, where he had been executive chef, to head up Hibiscus’ kitchen jointly with Ferraro. The restaurant’s handling of meats has been very impressive under Ferraro’s leadership (it certainly went a long way in earning the restaurant four stars); Simon brought Dodds on to help elevate the vegetable part of the equation. Vegetable sourcing, says Simon, is somewhat complicated in Dallas. “You have to cobble together a lot of those relationships, and Graham has them. We’re now really focused on changing the vegetables and some of the fish. I think we’re going to maintain that team for a while, and I think the restaurant is going to take another step forward as a result.”

And what about the sweet side of Hibiscus, which I wrote in my review needs a serious makeover (“the seasonality, freshness and lovely simplicity of the savory courses tend to go missing on the sweet side,” I wrote). For the past four or five months, Simon has been in the process of interviewing for a new pastry chef — which he says has been a challenge in Dallas. “The pastry chef community in Dallas is a little shallow if you don’t want to do really retro,” he says. Therefore, Consilient has started seeking pastry chefs from outside North Texas. He has just hired a pastry chef for Front Room — Alison Morse, a New Jersey native who he says came up through the ranks at Wolfgang Puck’s organization. She was head pastry chef at Fornelletto at Borgata Casino and Hotel at Atlantic City, and most recently was on the pastry team at Five Sixty here in Dallas. Today at Hibiscus, Consilient doing a tasting with a prospective pastry chef; Simon is eager for a hire to happen soon. “It’s a little painful every time a two-pound chocolate cake comes out of the kitchen right now,” he says.

Meanwhile, he’s also excited about Victor Tangos, where Kirsten Brewer took over as chef late last year. “She owns that menu now,” he says, adding that she changes it up frequently. “She’s a talent.” Victor Tangos was included in the list of The Best in DFW Gastropubs earlier this year.

As for taking over Dallas’ culinary world, that’s not the way Simon describes his mission. Rather, it’s creating a community of chefs that’s dedicated to sourcing and cooking in a way that expresses the company’s culinary philosophy, which he calls an “essentialist approach.”

The noodle mania sweeping Dallas, in case you haven’t noticed, is highly contagious. Not only that, but it fuels itself: A satisfying bowl of ramen leads to a great bowl of pho, and then one is left craving a steaming bowl of hand-pulled Langhou-style lamian noodles with sliced beef and daikon. That’s what happened to me as I reported my story about Dallas going noodle-crazy, and one evening I found myself at a table at Royal China. I requested a seat in the main dining room, so I could watch Zhang Xue Liang, the noodle master owners Kai-Chi “George” Kao and B-Lan “April” Kao brought over from China in 2010 to work there. (Suzanne Martaprofiled him in our pages.)

The chef noticed me watching him pulling and stretching and practically doing gymnastics with the noodles, and he started hamming it up. Before I knew it, I was videotaping him on my iPhone. He put on quite a show — if you want to smile, take a look.

Have you thought about heading over for Tanoshii Ramen and Bar? I thought so. I stopped in for dinner a couple nights ago and thought I’d share what I found.

We arrived at about 7 (on a weeknight) and the place was packed, with people spilling out the door waiting for tables. A table for two would be 30-45 minutes, we were told, and the hostess took our phone number. No way to sit at the bar and have a drink, as every seat was taken up by a noodle-slurper. Instead we had a beer next door at Angry Dog (where we were stunned by the price of a glass of beer. More on that later…). Half an hour later, our table was ready.

I’m not going to discuss the quality of what we ate, as Tanoshii had only been open a week — instead, I’ll be more descriptive.

Leslie Brenner/Staff

Blistered shishitos and hamachi sashimi at Tanoshii

Somehow, as the city had been buzzing (forever!) about the upcoming opening of Tanoshii, from Joey and Chi Le (owners of Wicked Po’Boys and Seafood in Richardson), I was expected a relatively modest ramen shop. But this feels like a real restaurant. Or a ramen hall. The great-looking space, designed by Coeval Studio (Pakpao, Outpost American Tavern, etc.), keeps the Deep Elllum building’s original brick walls, high tin ceiling and leaded glass windows on the upper part of the facade. There’s a long wooden banquette with tables facing an attractive bar, a few booths and a long communal table in the middle of the roomy dining room — which stars a colorful mural of the Monkey King, a character from an old Japanese storybook. Behind a window in back, you can see the cooks (the recipes are all Chi Le’s) at work.

There are Asian-hipster craft cocktails and plenty of sakes to choose from, along with a small selection of “izakaya” dishes to start things off, things like edamame, blistered shishitos or hamachi sashimi with ponzu and jalapeños. (An izakaya is a Japanese tavern serving a wide variety of bar snacks.) There are also an array of steamed buns — we had one with pork belly, iceberg lettuce, spicy mayo and cilantro. They come two to an order. There are also two kinds of dumplings — pork and shrimp-filled pan-fried gyozas and kimchi-tofu mandu, and a couple of banh xeo (Vietnamese crepes).

Leslie Brenner/Staff

Curry ramen at Tanoshii

And then the main event — the ramen. We went for the classic tonkotsu ramen ($10) and the curry ramen. The tonkotsu, squiggly noodles in a rich pork broth, was garnished with slices of pork belly, bamboo shoots, kikurage mushrooms, bok choy, nitamago (a runny-centered boiled egg) and scallions. The curry ($14), a hot-and-spicy, soupy affair with coconutty Southeast Asian flavors, came topped with tempura prawns, mussels, bamboo shoots and cherry tomatoes.

As I mentioned, it’s much to early to issue a critical judgement, but I will say that the place is very vibrant, with great energy — a lot of fun.

Here’s a funny thing — about that Monkey King mural. Another noodle spot, Monkey King Noodle Co., just opened a few blocks away. But the two places have nothing to do with each other. The Monkey King theme is just a coincidence. “We were all a bit surprised when Monkey King Noodle Co. snuck up on us over there,” says Tanoshii publicist Lindsey Miller.

It’s open only for dinner for now, Tuesday-Thursday 5 to 10 p.m. and Friday-Saturday 5 p.m. to 3 a.m. (hurray for wee hour eats!). On Sunday, you can do a lunchier thing, as it’s open 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. The owners plan to add weekday lunches later this month.

The dining room at CBD Provisions will be the setting for future pork fests

By now you’ve heard that Consilient Hospitality will be opening CBD Provisions in the Joule hotel — and that opening is on track, says publicist Brooke Hortenstine, for Oct. 10. Have you been as curious as I have about what chef Michael Sindoni will have on his menu? Well, your curiosity (if not your hunger) can be instantly sated, as CBD’s website is now up and the breakfast, lunch, brunch and dinner menus are posted.

How does it look? Pretty alluring — especially if you’re a pork lover. Looks like a pork fest in the making at the Joule! But there’s lots more, too.

For dinner, starters include “little goat pie” with stout-braised cabrito; pig tails with guajillo barbecue and kohlrabi peach slaw; and broiled Gulf oysters with (are you sitting down?) absinthe-whipped lardo and bacon crumble. After that, you can order 18-hour pork shoulder with crispy hominy and green chiles, or pig-head carnitas served family-style. I am so there.

Lunchtime offerings include a whole hog Cuban sandwich; a smoked fish salad with green goddess dressing; red chili or a burger, both made with Texas grass-fed beef. The burger comes with Texas cheddar. Or how about a pressed grilled cheese sandwich with house-made mortadella?

The breakfast and brunch menus look promising, too, with things like ndjua pimento cheese (pork!); ham and egg gougères (pork!) with Benton’s Country Ham and poached farm eggs; and green chile pork (pork!) tacos. If you’re feeling more sweet than savory, there are house-made pastries; buckwheat pancakes with housemade blueberry jam; and sourdough French toast with Texas pecan “Nutella” and bananas.